Fedora is too much into RedHat, and that's an American company, it depends on it. You'll have to go at least Arch, or Debian (which are more community-driven), or Ubuntu or Mint (that are European). But I wouldn't use anything Redhat-produced for an EU OS.
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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SUSE/OpenSUSE seems like a much more European option
Τοο bad I don't like it as a distro... I find it ugly, e.g. the ancient yast gui it has. I'd prefer Debian myself, or a fork of it (if politically necessary).
So you find Gnome & KDE ugly? I've never needed to use Yast for any system configuration. Having BTFRS with snapshots as default makes it a great distro.
Yast is a must to configure it without headaches. It's an eyesore. I also don't like rpm in general. I tried OpenSuse last year, and I didn't like the experience of it. Then again, I don't like Fedora either. And I find Arch unstable. For me, Debian is where it's at.
Someone who doesn’t use the distro is saying a tool ‘is a must’ when I do use the distro and have never needed it. You do you, but the point of my original comment was that it’s a valid distro for Europeans wanting a non-US option. Doesn’t mean you need to like it or use, but others might.
As I said, I used it last year. I didn't like it. I WANT gui tools, like yast, but not ones that were designed in the '90s. Linux Mint has the best user experience.
rofl, Fedora for EU what a joke...
I wonder how much work is entailed in transforming Fedora in to a distro that meets some definition of the word "Sovereign" 🤔
Personally I wouldn't want to make a project like this be dependent on the whims of a US defense contractor like RedHat/IBM, especially after what happened with CentOS.
I read the sovereign to mean something like an unified platform for EU institutions, that you can dev and train people on.
dependent on the whims of a US defense contractor like RedHat/IBM
A very good point.
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Why Fedora? They're basically Red Hat in a trench coat. I'd go with a EU based distro like Suse.
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If the EU were concerned about the US jurisdiction of Linux projects it could pick:
- OpenSuSE (org based in Germany)
- Mint (org based in Ireland)
- Manjaro (org based in France/Germany, and based of Arch)
- Ubuntu (org based in UK)
However if they didn't care, then they could just use Fedora or other US based distros.
I think it would be a good idea for the EU to adopt linux officially, and maybe even have it's own distro, but I'm not sure this Fedora base makes sense. Ironically this may also be breaching EU trademarks as it's masquerading as an official project by calling itself EU OS.
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The idea of a "distro for EU public sector" is neat, but even the PoC has some flaws when considering technical sovereignty.
First of all, using Gitlab & Gitlab CI. Gitlab is an American company with most of its developers based in the US. Sure, you could host it by yourself but why would you do it considering Forgejo is lighter and mostly developed by developers based in the EU area?
The idea of basing it on Fedora is also somewhat confusing. Sure, it's a good distro for derivatives, but it's mostly developed by IBM developers. The tech sovereignty argument doesn't hold well against Murphy's law.
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Why Fedora? Sorry, but there are so many European options, it makes no sense to build a European house on an American basement.
As far as I'm concerned, open-source has no nationality, even for a public-sector project. Yes, Red Hat is American. They also don't own Fedora.
From the very start, we've been built on the contributions of people from every corner of the globe, why should we care about petty geographical squabbles like this?
Yes, Red Hat is American, and whether you like it or not, this comes with legal and political dependencies. Fedora is subject to U.S. laws (e.g., Cloud Act, export controls), which poses a risk to EU digital sovereignty.
Yes, Red Hat does not own Fedora. And IBM, which owns Red Hat, also does not own Fedora. But it has significant influence and could prioritize business or political interests over EU needs.
And another question is: Why shouldn’t we use a European OS when we already have viable alternatives?
Probably since it's the main redhat upstream and they want the advantage of already widespread usage.
Although at that point why not OpenSUSE for the same reason you mentioned.
Security is a big focus for gov usage, why not base off of Debian?
Rolling release/bleeding edge means security updates roll out fast.
Regular release distros do security updates, backported if needed. Rolling release means introducing unknown security bugs until they are found and fixed. To me, the whole dilemma between regular and rolling is do I want old bugs or new bugs? But the security bugs get fixed on both.
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But Fedora is based on an IBM product... so that's a swing and a miss. SuSE would be a better direction, IMO
Only after IBM purchased Redhat recently
Which was my point, yes.
Scammers never let a good global crisis get in their way.
- Rebadge a distro and say it's fromm the EU
- .....????
- Profit!
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@SpiceDealer Sorry, what ? How can it be made in EU if it's a Fedora fork/derivative ?
I mean Fedora is open source but if they really wanted a european base, they could have gone with opensuse. AFAIK opensuse is the only fully european linux distro plus they use many of the same tech that redhat/fedora does.
Ultimately I think it doesn't matter too much since even the linux foundation is based in the US and large parts of what makes the linux desktop are maintained by non-EU companies (on top of all the major projects hosted by Github, Gitlab including most of Flathub). If its all open source, I think the risks are pretty low e.g. huawei was able to use Android despite all the restrictions.
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As much as I love what they're doing, tieing an OS to a specific region via name seems like the opposite of Open Source values.. Then again, I suppose it could just be forked into a more generalized version
This is specifically for the public sector. The fact that it is open source make it adaptable to different scenarios.
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